Category: Viking Sapphire

Sapphire 850 Issues

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I bought my Viking Sapphire 850 specifically for quilting because it has that great 10″ bed. Up until early this year it was working great for Free Motion. No problems. Then it all went south. My thread started breaking every few inches, the needles started jamming and breaking. I was ready to throw it out the window.  Fortunately I have a service contract.

Took it in to the dealer and Diane was able to get it to work just fine. However, she meandered much slower than I do. But Sheesh it was working great for over a year. So, we sent it off for cleaning etc. And, she recommended I try the M foot rather than the spring foot.

I got it back and last week tried some meandering with he M foot. No dice. Thread breaking but no needle breaks. I was so mad, I packed it up in the car to take it back in. Then I jumped on the Internet and did some searches. What I found was that some owner’s had to problems at all and some owner’s had to fiddle with the settings. So, back out to the car, lug it back inside, set it up again, and play.

Well, long story short, here’s how I got it to Free Motion with no problems. I put on the spring foot, I did NOT lower the feed dogs, and I did NOT change the settings to use the Spring Foot setting, I did not change the fabric weight to Heavy. And, I meandered the whole quilt above with the thread breaking only once and that was my fault.

Just shows that every machine is different. I’m happy now.

What’s on my wall?

Posted in Christmas Lights, Viking Sapphire1 Comment

I threw up these twelve blocks a week ago just to have something different to look at. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet. Maybe incorporate them into a quilt with some Halloween blocks from swap we did a few years ago. See what having them on the wall resulted in? I wouldn’t have thought of that if I hadn’t been staring at them mindlessly this past weekend.

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So this past weekend I got to pay with my new Viking Sapphire 850. I absolutely love this machine and I got a fantastic deal on it. Saturday I quilted borders on both my Old Tobacco Road and my Orange Crush, finally! Not finished yet, but they are well on their way. What a difference a good machine with a 10″ throat makes.

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And, that pile of four patches in the picture is growing like crazy. I’m making those for Part 1 of Bonnie’s Christmas Lights mystery just published in Quiltmaker magazine, July/August issue. I subscribed to Quiltmaker earlier this year because Bonnie told us this mystery was coming. I had a bin full of 2″ strips of all different lengths so I just started sewing lights to darks until I got tired, then cut them into two inches pieces until I got tired of that, and then sewed them together randomly to make 4 patches. I have way more 4 patches than I will need for this quilt (52), but Bonnie’s quilts always seem to use scrappy 4 patches so they won’t go to waste.

I was experimenting with the 1/4″ quilting foot that I got for the Sapphire versus the 1/4″ stitch setting on the machine using the regular A foot. The 1/4″ foot makes a really generous quarter inch seam so that’s no good and you can’t move the needle over because the hole is very small. I’m just wondering if I can make that hole bigger because I love the edge on the foot for butting the fabric against. Since the foot is plastic, I’m thinking there’s got to be a way to enlarge the hole so I can move the needle over to the right a bit to get a scant 1/4″ seam. Otherwise, I’m totally happy with the 1/4″ stitch built into the machine. What is does is move the needle over to the right just enough so that if you line up the edge of the fabric with the right edge of the foot, you get a perfect scant 1/4″ seam. So that’s what I used to make all these 4 patches.

This machine is just amazing with it’s 10″ bed, needle down and foot up to pivot position. I did a cable border on the outside border of OTR without having to constantly lift the foot to pivot on the curve. And, it sews beautifully. I can’t say enough about it so far.